SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwired) — 08/15/13 — Swiftype, the Y Combinator startup that is evolving site search into a powerful marketing and conversion tool for web businesses, announced today it has raised a seed round of $1.7 million in funding that includes some of the most successful Silicon Valley investors and venture capital firms.
Andreesen-Horowitz Seed, NEA, Kleiner Perkins and Ignition made up the institutional side of the fundraising round. Angel investors included Sam Altman, SV Angel, Alexis Ohanian, Paul Buchheit, Crunchfund, DST/Start Fund, Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, Jared Kopf, William Morris Endeavor, Data Collective, Scribd founders Jared Friedman and Trip Adler, and Tikhon Bernstam.
Swiftype has seen explosive growth, with search queries up 15x over last year. More than 70,000 websites use Swiftype for site search. Swiftype client websites now generate more than 130 million queries every month.
“We-re helping our clients provide great search results to their users, but we-re also offering new insight into how those users are engaging with the content through search,” said Quinlan Hoxie, Swiftype co-founder. “Our analytics provide real-time business intelligence that can help drive content decisions while improving conversions and retention.”
Swiftype has already established itself as a leader in a hosted site search solutions. The hosted model allows Swiftype to offer its powerful search technology at a fraction of the cost of the old hardware enabled site search. And clients gain from the data and intelligence that Swiftype uses from the millions of searches on its search platform.
“Search is really like no other technology inside an online business, because you can-t just build it and plug it in,” said Matt Riley, Swiftype co-founder. “Search has to learn and improve all the time in order to offer a great experience. Our collective size really helps us build smarter search for our clients that they wouldn-t have access to if they are limited to just seeing the queries on their own site.”
Swiftype is unique in that it is enterprise quality search offered as a cloud-based solution. Companies can literally buy the service right from the Swiftype site. Sites can actually try it before they buy Swiftype Site Search. Any site can evaluate how the Swiftype Site Search Experience will work on its own site just by typing in the home page URL.
Swiftype may be the most powerful marketing tool that people haven-t even heard of. Swiftype site search provides a fantastic search experience, but more importantly the platform delivers analytics that any site can use to increase conversions, boost sales and drive return visits. Swiftype was founded by Quinlan Hoxie and Matt Riley in January of 2012 at Y Combinator and is currently located in San Francisco.
Media Contact:
Nicole Brunet
SutherlandGold Group
408-761-1803
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